7 ms·

Tilck: A tiny Linux-compatible kernel

286 points by chubot 1y ago

jlundberg 1y ago
The README was surprisingly lengthy and interesting. Worth a read for osdev people!
adastra22 1y ago
This is fantastic. The problem with Linux is the dev culture at the top. I've long wished for an alternative kernel project that might serve as a better dev model. This has the potential.
- marsven_422 1y ago
  The kernel dev culture is excellent, it's pure meritocracy. We all know that Rust in the kernel is a political operation to change this to woke.
  - adrianN 1y ago
    I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. Is it a joke that I'm not getting?
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > I've long wished for an alternative kernel project that might serve as a better dev model. Do you have something against FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, illumos, Redox, or (if you don't need a unix-like) Haiku?
  - adastra22 1y ago
    Linux syscall compatibility.
    - Cloudef 1y ago
      Doesn't BSD have that?
      - cestith 1y ago
        Some of them do.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
      FreeBSD, NetBSD, and illumos have that.
    - numpad0 1y ago
      Linux won BECAUSE of whatever dev culture at the top you mention, not DESPITE. There are plenty other more permissive Unix-like OS, and none are more relevant than Linux.
- peterfirefly 1y ago
  A lot of the top maintainers have probably been in that role for too long. 30-40% fresh blood (read: replacements) within a few months would probably do wonders.
weinzierl 1y ago
Every couple of months a new "Operating System" kernel which does not provide hardware abstraction and only runs in a VM pops up. Tilck is not like that! Tilck is a real operating system. It runs on real hardware. The space for the former is overly crowded but I think Tilck really fills a gap that has been mostly unoccupied before.
userbinator 1y ago
Doesn't look like you can run WINE on it, which would make for an interesting Windows replacement.
- lukaslalinsky 1y ago
  Why would you just not use Linux to run WINE. It's not realistic to replace all the drivers that make Linux so universally usable as it is. If you specifically want it as a Windows replacement, the Linux distro that Valve is building seems like the best bet.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  The readme explicitly states it’s not suitable for desktop usage. For staters, it doesn’t support all the features needed to run x11. This looks like a very interesting project for OS devs but if you’re after a Windows replacement then there’s already a few options out there from ReactOS to Linux-distros that come with Wine configured as part of the base install.
  - ryao 1y ago
    Details on what is missing that a X11 server needs are here: https://github.com/vvaltchev/tilck/discussions/81 https://github.com/vvaltchev/tilck/discussions/81
    - hnlmorg 1y ago
      To be honest, that reads less like details on what's missing to port x11, and more like a frustrated exchange between a project author who's clearly stating what the project cannot do, and an overly enthusiastic member of the community who's vastly underestimated the amount of work required to run x11. Credit to the authors patience throughout that exchange, though. I've had similar exchanges with some of my open source projects too. It's great when people do want to try things but it can cost the author a lot of time and effort helping people on endeavors that you already know will fail and already know it isn't where you're time should be spent. And can be particularly frustrating when you know those participants are unlikely to contribute any code that would further the project's goals. But you still have to show them courtesy because the last thing you want to do is kill their enthusiasm for open source.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
brucehoult 1y ago
Nice! Looks like an interesting mid-point between xv6 (modern reimplementation of Sixth Edition Unix from 1975 e.g. Lion book) and a full Linux kernel. Great to see it runs on the LicheeRV Nano, a $9 RISC-V board with 1.0 GHz 64 bit CPU (C906) with MMU, FPU, 128 bit vector unit (RVV draft 0.7.1) and 256 MB of in-package DDR3. That's comparable to a midlife Pentium III or PowerPC G4. It should be a very easy port to the Milk-V Duo 256M (same SG2002 SoC) or Duo S (SG2000 with 512 MB RAM for $9.90) or original Duo (closely related CV1800B with 64 MB RAM for $5). No network or block device support at present, and no multi-core either, by the looks.
- anthk 1y ago
  A G4 with Altivec was almost on par on a PIV with SSE2 for multimedia.
  - brucehoult 1y ago
    Multimedia is important for some uses, not for others. And what speed G4, against what speed Pentium 4? G4 started from 450 MHz and went to 1.6 GHz, with several different µarch along the way. Conversely, the Pentium 4 ranged from 1.3 GHz to 3.8 GHz. G4 and P3 at least covered a nearly identical MHz range, and with similar MHz in the market at the same times.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      Pentium 4 had an exceptionally long pipeline to be able to hit higher frequencies, trading-off high IPC numbers in the process, most of the time. On top of that, Pentium 4 also “looped” the same instruction while waiting data resulting in lower efficiency and higher heat output. So, I assume, they are “step by step” comparable. i.e. slowest P4 equal to slowest G3 and they are again equal at next stepping and so on.
      - anthk 1y ago
        Core Duo's are almost duct-taped PIIIs.
ryao 1y ago
It is interesting, although the lack of multiuser support is unfortunate. I really hope that the author reconsiders his stance on multiuser support, even if it is merely to allow things like chmod/chgrp to set file ownership to other users and groups. That would open the door to hosting a NFS server.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  Its file system compatibility story is a bigger hurdle there. To be honest, you’re much better off with a battle hardened platform for your use case. Tilck is meant to be educational, not secure in either the InfoSec nor data robustness sense.
  - ryao 1y ago
    Upon seeing this, thoughts keep occurring to me such as: * “It could be fun to be the author of a block layer, VFS and an AHCI driver for SATA. NCQ support is a must if I do.” * “It could be fun to port ZFS: ztest and zdb, plus the userland version of the driver into which they hook need pthreads, but the important userland utilities do not. Having to statically link everything would be a pain. I would probably have to reimplement the entire SPL for this to work and that would probably be at least 10,000 lines of code.” * “If I port ZFS, a NFS server needs to follow so ZFS has an application. This will need support for setting/getting user/group ownership and mode bits. If I rewrite the VFS, I could maybe sneak that feature into it for a NFS server to use while preserving the documented syscall behavior that requires everything be root. If I port the NFS server from illumos, it could share the SPL code with ZFS. NFSv4 permissions will be needed to make it fully happy. Beyond that, I will need a network stack.” * “It could be fun to port a network stack. Maybe LwIP could be used.” * “It could be fun to write an e1000 driver.” I have already found the documentation I need if I actually were to implement AHCI and e1000 drivers: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/technical-specifications/serial-ata-ahci-spec-rev1-3-1.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/manual/pci-pci-x-family-gbe-controllers-software-dev-manual.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/manual/pci-pci-x-famil... If I were to do all of this, I would likely try my best to make it a production platform. The purpose would be fun. Anyway, I wonder if these thoughts will continue if I sleep on them.
marto1 1y ago
I can see it's marked "educational", but would it be also suitable for smallish embedded devices ? Assuming the bootloader part is swapped out, etc.
rurban 1y ago
Previous discussions: 3 years ago, 75 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34295165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34295165 (no riscv64 then) 5 years ago, 7 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28040210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28040210
CaseFlatline 1y ago
Very nice. Its great to see how fast it boots, and it can run doom (framebuffer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce1pMlZO_mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce1pMlZO_mI (also nice to see the dev takes the time to reply to an aspiring CS student on what it takes to grow in this field - comments in youtube)
- bartvk 1y ago
  Nice and short video. Demonstrates Vim, which seems like a sizable piece of software to get compiled with a subset of all Linux syscalls.
netfortius 1y ago
For us, the "elderly", who grew up with Minix in the educational space, how useful is Tilck in this regard?
- cestith 1y ago
  Tilck is a small and deterministic monokernel that currently implements around 100 Linux syscalls in a Linux-compatible way. It’s a good educational tool, but is planned to be a Linux-compatible RTOS kernel. It currently supports statically linked binaries built against musl and boots and runs in about 3 megs of RAM. One of the goals is to be small enough and simple enough of a codebase to be useful for educational purposes. Another is to eventually be useful in production in embedded systems.
sylware 1y ago
A kernel is mostly "hardware drivers" with an ABI. That's why performant "standard" hardware programing interfaces are so much important. Those interfaces should be the simple and stable in time as much as possible. Many hardware realms have such _performant_ interface: nvme, usb, etc. Basically it means DMA, doorbells/IRQ "ring buffers", command ring buffers("queues"). Because for those alternative kernel initiatives, this would allow them to become 'real-life' much faster. And a NOTE related to RISC-V hardware: keep an eye on arm piggybacking RISC-V chips(they are the bad guys with their blocking/$$$ intellectual property), but the target goal does include AV1 video dec/enc blocks instead of mpeg, and DisplayPort instead of hdmi, because those are hardly less worse than arm. And some hardware is going even further, the "next step": user level hardware queues (look at AMD GPUs which started to implement those). I know there is 3D pipeline programming behind this hardware interface, but I believ that if they started to clean the base hardware interface, they will cleanup their 3D pipeline programming too.
hk1337 1y ago
This is really cool. It reminds me of the running linux on a 3.5" floppy as a NAT firewall.
pabs3 1y ago
A couple of other kernels compatible with the Linux userspace ABI: Fiwix Asterinas

286 points by chubot 1y ago

The README was surprisingly lengthy and interesting. Worth a read for osdev people!

This is fantastic. The problem with Linux is the dev culture at the top. I've long wished for an alternative kernel project that might serve as a better dev model. This has the potential.

marsven_422 1y ago
The kernel dev culture is excellent, it's pure meritocracy. We all know that Rust in the kernel is a political operation to change this to woke.
- adrianN 1y ago
  I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. Is it a joke that I'm not getting?
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> I've long wished for an alternative kernel project that might serve as a better dev model. Do you have something against FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, illumos, Redox, or (if you don't need a unix-like) Haiku?
- adastra22 1y ago
  Linux syscall compatibility.
  - Cloudef 1y ago
    Doesn't BSD have that?
    - cestith 1y ago
      Some of them do.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    FreeBSD, NetBSD, and illumos have that.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    Linux won BECAUSE of whatever dev culture at the top you mention, not DESPITE. There are plenty other more permissive Unix-like OS, and none are more relevant than Linux.
peterfirefly 1y ago
A lot of the top maintainers have probably been in that role for too long. 30-40% fresh blood (read: replacements) within a few months would probably do wonders.

weinzierl 1y ago

Every couple of months a new "Operating System" kernel which does not provide hardware abstraction and only runs in a VM pops up. Tilck is not like that! Tilck is a real operating system. It runs on real hardware. The space for the former is overly crowded but I think Tilck really fills a gap that has been mostly unoccupied before.

userbinator 1y ago

Doesn't look like you can run WINE on it, which would make for an interesting Windows replacement.

lukaslalinsky 1y ago
Why would you just not use Linux to run WINE. It's not realistic to replace all the drivers that make Linux so universally usable as it is. If you specifically want it as a Windows replacement, the Linux distro that Valve is building seems like the best bet.
hnlmorg 1y ago
The readme explicitly states it’s not suitable for desktop usage. For staters, it doesn’t support all the features needed to run x11. This looks like a very interesting project for OS devs but if you’re after a Windows replacement then there’s already a few options out there from ReactOS to Linux-distros that come with Wine configured as part of the base install.
- ryao 1y ago
  Details on what is missing that a X11 server needs are here: https://github.com/vvaltchev/tilck/discussions/81 https://github.com/vvaltchev/tilck/discussions/81
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    To be honest, that reads less like details on what's missing to port x11, and more like a frustrated exchange between a project author who's clearly stating what the project cannot do, and an overly enthusiastic member of the community who's vastly underestimated the amount of work required to run x11. Credit to the authors patience throughout that exchange, though. I've had similar exchanges with some of my open source projects too. It's great when people do want to try things but it can cost the author a lot of time and effort helping people on endeavors that you already know will fail and already know it isn't where you're time should be spent. And can be particularly frustrating when you know those participants are unlikely to contribute any code that would further the project's goals. But you still have to show them courtesy because the last thing you want to do is kill their enthusiasm for open source.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

brucehoult 1y ago

Nice! Looks like an interesting mid-point between xv6 (modern reimplementation of Sixth Edition Unix from 1975 e.g. Lion book) and a full Linux kernel. Great to see it runs on the LicheeRV Nano, a $9 RISC-V board with 1.0 GHz 64 bit CPU (C906) with MMU, FPU, 128 bit vector unit (RVV draft 0.7.1) and 256 MB of in-package DDR3. That's comparable to a midlife Pentium III or PowerPC G4. It should be a very easy port to the Milk-V Duo 256M (same SG2002 SoC) or Duo S (SG2000 with 512 MB RAM for $9.90) or original Duo (closely related CV1800B with 64 MB RAM for $5). No network or block device support at present, and no multi-core either, by the looks.

anthk 1y ago
A G4 with Altivec was almost on par on a PIV with SSE2 for multimedia.
- brucehoult 1y ago
  Multimedia is important for some uses, not for others. And what speed G4, against what speed Pentium 4? G4 started from 450 MHz and went to 1.6 GHz, with several different µarch along the way. Conversely, the Pentium 4 ranged from 1.3 GHz to 3.8 GHz. G4 and P3 at least covered a nearly identical MHz range, and with similar MHz in the market at the same times.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    Pentium 4 had an exceptionally long pipeline to be able to hit higher frequencies, trading-off high IPC numbers in the process, most of the time. On top of that, Pentium 4 also “looped” the same instruction while waiting data resulting in lower efficiency and higher heat output. So, I assume, they are “step by step” comparable. i.e. slowest P4 equal to slowest G3 and they are again equal at next stepping and so on.
    - anthk 1y ago
      Core Duo's are almost duct-taped PIIIs.

ryao 1y ago

It is interesting, although the lack of multiuser support is unfortunate. I really hope that the author reconsiders his stance on multiuser support, even if it is merely to allow things like chmod/chgrp to set file ownership to other users and groups. That would open the door to hosting a NFS server.

hnlmorg 1y ago
Its file system compatibility story is a bigger hurdle there. To be honest, you’re much better off with a battle hardened platform for your use case. Tilck is meant to be educational, not secure in either the InfoSec nor data robustness sense.
- ryao 1y ago
  Upon seeing this, thoughts keep occurring to me such as: * “It could be fun to be the author of a block layer, VFS and an AHCI driver for SATA. NCQ support is a must if I do.” * “It could be fun to port ZFS: ztest and zdb, plus the userland version of the driver into which they hook need pthreads, but the important userland utilities do not. Having to statically link everything would be a pain. I would probably have to reimplement the entire SPL for this to work and that would probably be at least 10,000 lines of code.” * “If I port ZFS, a NFS server needs to follow so ZFS has an application. This will need support for setting/getting user/group ownership and mode bits. If I rewrite the VFS, I could maybe sneak that feature into it for a NFS server to use while preserving the documented syscall behavior that requires everything be root. If I port the NFS server from illumos, it could share the SPL code with ZFS. NFSv4 permissions will be needed to make it fully happy. Beyond that, I will need a network stack.” * “It could be fun to port a network stack. Maybe LwIP could be used.” * “It could be fun to write an e1000 driver.” I have already found the documentation I need if I actually were to implement AHCI and e1000 drivers: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/technical-specifications/serial-ata-ahci-spec-rev1-3-1.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/manual/pci-pci-x-family-gbe-controllers-software-dev-manual.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/manual/pci-pci-x-famil... If I were to do all of this, I would likely try my best to make it a production platform. The purpose would be fun. Anyway, I wonder if these thoughts will continue if I sleep on them.

marto1 1y ago

I can see it's marked "educational", but would it be also suitable for smallish embedded devices ? Assuming the bootloader part is swapped out, etc.

rurban 1y ago

Previous discussions: 3 years ago, 75 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34295165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34295165 (no riscv64 then) 5 years ago, 7 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28040210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28040210

CaseFlatline 1y ago

Very nice. Its great to see how fast it boots, and it can run doom (framebuffer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce1pMlZO_mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce1pMlZO_mI (also nice to see the dev takes the time to reply to an aspiring CS student on what it takes to grow in this field - comments in youtube)

bartvk 1y ago
Nice and short video. Demonstrates Vim, which seems like a sizable piece of software to get compiled with a subset of all Linux syscalls.

netfortius 1y ago

For us, the "elderly", who grew up with Minix in the educational space, how useful is Tilck in this regard?

cestith 1y ago
Tilck is a small and deterministic monokernel that currently implements around 100 Linux syscalls in a Linux-compatible way. It’s a good educational tool, but is planned to be a Linux-compatible RTOS kernel. It currently supports statically linked binaries built against musl and boots and runs in about 3 megs of RAM. One of the goals is to be small enough and simple enough of a codebase to be useful for educational purposes. Another is to eventually be useful in production in embedded systems.

sylware 1y ago

A kernel is mostly "hardware drivers" with an ABI. That's why performant "standard" hardware programing interfaces are so much important. Those interfaces should be the simple and stable in time as much as possible. Many hardware realms have such _performant_ interface: nvme, usb, etc. Basically it means DMA, doorbells/IRQ "ring buffers", command ring buffers("queues"). Because for those alternative kernel initiatives, this would allow them to become 'real-life' much faster. And a NOTE related to RISC-V hardware: keep an eye on arm piggybacking RISC-V chips(they are the bad guys with their blocking/$$$ intellectual property), but the target goal does include AV1 video dec/enc blocks instead of mpeg, and DisplayPort instead of hdmi, because those are hardly less worse than arm. And some hardware is going even further, the "next step": user level hardware queues (look at AMD GPUs which started to implement those). I know there is 3D pipeline programming behind this hardware interface, but I believ that if they started to clean the base hardware interface, they will cleanup their 3D pipeline programming too.

hk1337 1y ago

This is really cool. It reminds me of the running linux on a 3.5" floppy as a NAT firewall.

pabs3 1y ago

A couple of other kernels compatible with the Linux userspace ABI: Fiwix Asterinas